Cloud computing is rapidly changing the Internet into a collection of clouds, which provide a variety of computing resources, storage resources, and, in the future, a variety of resources that are currently unimagined.
One issue with respect to virtualization is that when an enterprise offloads processing of one of its applications to a cloud environment and then subsequently experiences performance issues, the problem can be very difficult to track down. It may be that the problem is: with the enterprise's application, with the cloud provider's environment, or with a combination of the application and the environment.
In fact, some cloud providers may not provide many details at all to an enterprise as to the configuration of its environment; viewing this information as proprietary in nature. The actual environment can be very complex with many resources interacting with one another; so, the enterprise that deploys its applications to such an environment feels as if it is dealing with a black box, which is fine when things run smoothly but obviously problematic when things do not run smoothly.
Most metric-based performance tools provided in the industry lack sufficient detail to resolve where performance bottlenecks lie. That is, the existing tools do little beyond indicating how long (usually in seconds or minutes) that something processes. The actual dependencies occurring within the environment are not specified and any in depth analysis requires customized programming and often assistance of the cloud provider.
It can be particularly frustrating for an Information Technology (IT) department to spend a tremendous amount of human resources and time to track down a performance bottleneck associated with an enterprise's application in a cloud environment only to eventually learn that the real issue was with a particular resource or particular configuration of the cloud being used.
Once a cloud provider's culpability is identified and confirmed, the cloud provider will usually resolve the issue but not reimburse the enterprise for its efforts and that resolution does little to appease the customers of the enterprise that became frustrated with the enterprise while the performance issues were still lingering. In fact, the reputation of the enterprise may have already been irreparably damaged in the customer community. Issues such as this is one of many reasons many enterprises have not completely embraced cloud computing.